Adapting Smallholder Agriculture to Climate Change through Sustainable Land Management Practices： Empirical Evidence from North-West Ethiopia

The objective of this paper was to determine the factors that influence farmers＇ decision to use two categories of sustainable land management （SLM） practices as adaptation strategy to climate change in the North-West Ethiopia. It was based on analysis of data collected from 734 farm household heads and employed probit regression model to analyze the determinants of adaptation to climate change through SLM measures. Based on the model result, factors, like perception of climate change, exposure to adaptation techniques, education, perception of land degradation, slope, land prone to degradation, number of parcels, crop enterprise income, land size, farm distance, economically active family size and agro-ecology are found important in determining farmers＇ decision to use structural land management practices. Likewise, perception of climate change, exposure to adaptation, farming experience, slope, crop enterprise income, land prone to degradation and agro-ecology are found important in affecting farmers＇ decision to use non-structural land management practices as adaptation measure. Therefore, in line with the findings of the analysis, any intervention that promotes use of land management practices as adaptation strategy should take into account agro-ecology specific factors that are relevant to the nature of the land management practices. Moreover, since scaling up of SLM practices as adaptation strategy is resource intensive, it requires both public and non-public investment for providing technological support and raising awareness. Failure to do so would adversely affect crop productivity and exacerbate food insecurity problems at farm household level.

Research on physical layer traffic management schemes in serial RapidIO interconnect

A traffic management scheme in serial RapidlO （SR10） interconnect is proposed to deal with the performance degradation caused by noise and electromagnetic interference （EMI）, which is generated by hardly avoidable errors of hardware implementation and tough working environment. The main idea of this scheme includes adaptive speed transition and freeze-acknowledgement （freeze-ACK）. Adaptive speed transition can improve throughput and reduce delay in high bit error rate （BER） environment. Simultaneously, freeze-ACK is adopted to conquer frequent usage of feedback channel. Simulation shows that the scheme of combining adaptive speed transition with freeze-ACK offers great performance improvement in SRIO network.

Study on Inventory Cost Control under JIT System

Traditional inventory control methods generally emphasize minimizing costs. Under current thinking, we not only consider cost control, but also tie inventory management directly into production scheduling. This system, called ＂Just-in-Time delivery＂, is based on having inventory arrive at the factory door just as it is needed on the assembly line. This inventory management technique of essential zero raw material inventory speeds inventory turnover rate and greatly reduces holding cost. This paper analyzes and compares all aspects related to both traditional and JIT systems, and explores ways of reducing inventory costs. The result is the elimination of waste, the speed-up of inventory turnover and the increase in productivity, all with the objective of maximizing profitability. Using advanced logistics （physical distribution methods） will enhance the business image, strengthen international competitive ability and contribute greatly to increase gross domestic product.